Our recent drama work in Year 11 at Lansdowne School has focussed on exploring some of the scenes in Shelley’s classic Frankenstein novel. This is a piece of text that the students have been working on during English lessons. We have been looking in depth at some of the main characters and their motivations.
This work was then carried forward for our drama lessons. The students were asked to choose one of their favourite scenes from the book to then improvise and act out. Examples included creating the monster, the moving letter from Elizabeth, and the monster wanting to find a partner.
Key to this acting was improvisation. The Year 11 students have now been able to move away from relying upon scripts as part of our drama work. Mr Jukes has been helping each pupil to understand how acting can often involve quick thinking and responding to others actors around us.
Two small groups were then set up. Short rehearsals took place, before a performance at the end of the session. One of the groups improvised and acted out a slight twist to the classic Frankenstein scene: some new characters found the instructions for creating the monster. They thought that they could improve on the imperfections found in the monster contained in the book. You can watch where this leads to in the short video above.